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Seinfeld on All4

Started by Bad Ambassador, February 11, 2020, 10:27:42 AM

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undeliberated

Surely the finest bit of Dark Seinfeld is using Josef Mengele as a minor punchline (in the babka-buying scene of the dinner party). I like how offhand it is: a sign that for all that Seinfeld takes place in a narrow sitcom-world bubble, it doesn't cut itself off from the full range of history and its horrors, but brings them in and makes them commensurable with shirt-button etiquette.

EOLAN

You have the episode where they use the sharing name of Joel Rifkin for comedy purposes in the Masseuse. Of course there is the wonderful bonus in hindsight of Elaine suggesting that OJ would be a suitable replacement name for her boyfriend; eight months before Mr Simpson really dishonoured that name (allegedly).

gilbertharding


buttgammon

Quote from: EOLAN on November 02, 2020, 11:15:14 AM
You have the episode where they use the sharing name of Joel Rifkin for comedy purposes in the Masseuse. Of course there is the wonderful bonus in hindsight of Elaine suggesting that OJ would be a suitable replacement name for her boyfriend; eight months before Mr Simpson really dishonoured that name (allegedly).

That's interesting - on the recent rewatch I just assumed this was made after the OJ Simpson debacle.

El Unicornio, mang

Me too, particularly as they use the OJ police chase clip as part of one of the episodes.

The "maybe the dingo ate your baby" line is kind of dark, given what it's referencing.

Icehaven

Quote from: good times on September 21, 2020, 11:49:26 AM
Elaine never goes out with any good looking guys (even the so-called pretty boy Tony or whatever his name was isn't really good looking even though it's a plot point)


I'd have to disagree, he may have had the petsonality of a brick but Puddy/Patrick Warburton is extremely attractive. I presumed that was supposed to be why Elaine still went out with him even though he drove her mad.

sevendaughters

he has an annoying voice and delivery but Jake Jarmel is attractive.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on September 16, 2020, 01:43:52 PM
I'm really noticing this time around how ridiculously good-looking all the women who date Jerry and George are. I know this is par for the course in American sitcoms regardless of how unattractive the male characters are, but it's ludicrious, even moreso when they dump them because they don't like how they hold a fork or something.
That's the joke, isn't it? Jerry and George's petty gripes are all the funnier when their girlfriends are so far out of their league.

Although, ironically, it means they're not so superficial that they value looks over personality.

ajsmith2

Quote from: undeliberated on November 02, 2020, 11:09:38 AM
Surely the finest bit of Dark Seinfeld is using Josef Mengele as a minor punchline (in the babka-buying scene of the dinner party). I like how offhand it is: a sign that for all that Seinfeld takes place in a narrow sitcom-world bubble, it doesn't cut itself off from the full range of history and its horrors, but brings them in and makes them commensurable with shirt-button etiquette.

Speaking of darker moments in Seinfeld, the nazi episode in series 3 is a bit of a surprise when re watched today. It's a pretty straight on portayal of contemporary 'socially respectable' white nationalists without any softening cartoonishness. Unfortunately pretty ahead of the curve given the last 5 or soi years of poltical shenanigans.  Kind of mad really that David Duke is mentioned in two seperate Seinfeld episodes (the other being The Dinner Party).

Menu

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on November 02, 2020, 12:16:55 PM
Me too, particularly as they use the OJ police chase clip as part of one of the episodes.

The "maybe the dingo ate your baby" line is kind of dark, given what it's referencing.

Yeah I never liked that one. If you're going to reference something like that you better make it worthwhile, and they don't. I always think, what if one of the parents saw that. I know you shouldn't determine what goes into a TV show on that criteria, but it seemed remarkably inhuman as a reference.

colacentral

Quote from: neveragain on November 02, 2020, 05:49:35 AM
And people on this thread have said the dark characters aspect was something critics came up with after the fact.

Not them "being dark"; that they were purposely written as sociopaths / "unlikeable", which is different to arguing the humour could be dark.

I think some people have a kind of double standard when they watch fiction, that they hold fictional characters to a different standard than they hold themselves. I find it very hard to imagine that most, if not all posters on this forum, would be dropping a monocle in real life over a sardonic comment like the one quoted ("... carve that fat bastard up") over a surgery of someone they didn't know, when you look at the jokes that used to be in the tags for example; remembering too that the character who delivers that line is Jerry, the stand-up comedian, and he says it with a huge grin as if to say he knows it's a bit rum.

I don't think it's correct to say that it's about four "bad" people. I think it is correct to say that the show is completely devoid of sentimentality, like most comedy is - in sketch comedy and stand up, for example, it would be extremely rare to find anything sentimental. I think that quality probably derives from what it was originally conceived as, I.e. a show about how a comedian finds material. It's really a subjectively told series of 20 minute sketches or stand up routines, eg "my annoying neighbour did this," "I went on a date where this happened," "I put my foot in my mouth when I said..."

As I said before, I do think the show leaned more into nastiness from around season 7 onwards, particularly in regards to George, but I think out of a desperation to out do previous episodes rather than because it was something fundamental to the intention of the show.

Think about the handicap spot as an example earlier in the series that someone might cite as the character being "unlikeable" - if I'm remembering it correctly, the car park is full, and Kramer persuades George to just park in the disabled space as they won't be that long anyway. The series of events that occur off the back of that, with the angry mob etc, is so over the top that you'd still feel sorry for George, having such ridiculous bad luck to have that to happen to him the one time he decides to park there, and for it not even being his idea in the first place, but something he did at the behest of Kramer. We saw it from his point of view, our sympathy is with him; the angry mob haven't seen it, they just think he's an inconsiderate arse.

More importantly, the story is relatable to anyone who has been through the hell of trying to find somewhere to park at times like Christmas, seen that one empty disabled space,
and been tempted by it, only to think that by sod's law the worst case scenario will happen. I'd assume that same thought process was how the episode came about. It wouldn't have been a thought process of the writer imagining bad things that George can do.

As I said before, I find that there's for the most part usually a relatable seed in most of the stories, at least outside of Kramer's stories and the more cartoonish George ones. I think to think of it as a series about four "unlikeable" characters is to miss the point.



The Cloud of Unknowing

And Jerry allows Kramer free access to his apartment, more or less - certainly the run of his kitchen. That's not sociopathically selfish, it's generous.

colacentral

I also think it's a bit reductive. They have noticeable pronounced flaws, which makes them more real than characters in other american sitcoms of the time, so in comparison to something like Friends they do appear to be awful people. But really they are flawed people in a world of other flawed people.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

The friends in Friends were awful people.

Blue Jam

Quote from: good times on September 21, 2020, 11:49:26 AM
Elaine never goes out with any good looking guys

What about that medical student she was helping with his exam revision who then dumped her "to go and find someone better" the second he qualified as a doctor? He was alright ;)

Quote from: icehaven on November 02, 2020, 03:54:06 PM
I'd have to disagree, he may have had the petsonality of a brick but Puddy/Patrick Warburton is extremely attractive. I presumed that was supposed to be why Elaine still went out with him even though he drove her mad.

Patrick Warburton popped up in the episode of Archer I was watching last night, playing a ruggedly handsome agent who has to rescue Archer and who has all the female agents and Ray swooning over him. I think the character design was at least in part based on the actor:



Elaine does seem to get a lot of really creepy dates though, like the psychoanalyst who was obsessed with the frequency of her toilet visits and the randy dentist played by Bryan Cranston.

Blue Jam

As for Jerry's dates, the Man-Hands episode made me a bit self-conscious for a while after I first saw it. As an owner of large hands I'd had no idea some men found them such a turn-off.

Now I'm older and less insecure I'm just thankful I can carry lots of pint glasses or laboratory glassware at once.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: Blue Jam on November 03, 2020, 01:59:39 PM
As for Jerry's dates, the Man-Hands episode made me a bit self-conscious... Now I'm older and less insecure
You definitely don't want to be watching Archer otherwise.

Blue Jam

#407
Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 03, 2020, 02:01:28 PM
You definitely don't want to be watching Archer otherwise.

I am enjoying Archer, even with Lana and her man-hands, that's how over it I am.

Just had a potentially sacrilegious thought, but bear with me: Is Sex And The City kind of an all-female Seinfeld? Or at least heavily influenced by it? I don't want to revisit SATC but iirc it consists mainly of group of four New York-based neurotic friends who are serial daters and who dump good-looking dates for relatively petty reasons.

I used to fucking hate SATC but me and my flatmates at the time still hate-watched it religiously. Arrrggghh.

Blue Jam


ajsmith2

Quote from: Menu on November 03, 2020, 02:56:09 AM
Yeah I never liked that one. If you're going to reference something like that you better make it worthwhile, and they don't. I always think, what if one of the parents saw that. I know you shouldn't determine what goes into a TV show on that criteria, but it seemed remarkably inhuman as a reference.

I ashamed to say I didn't know anything about the facts of this case until I looked it up today, but to be slightly fair on Seinfeld in this instance, it seems to have become a massive media circus and subsequently pre internet meme that tons of other properties (including Rugrats!) have referenced in similarly flippant ways. Which doesn't make the Seinfeld reference any less heartless taken on it's own I guess, but it seems to have unfortunately become the kind of cultural vernacular of the kind that someone could end up casually referencing without knowing too much about it's tragic origin.  For my own part I'd heard the phrase in various things over the years but had to idea it derived from a real horrible tragedy until today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_ate_my_baby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Azaria_Chamberlain


gilbertharding

The point of the joke isn't (as far as I know) about the case, as such - it's exactly about the media circus, I assume, specifically the Meryl Streep film.

There's a similar thing where Jerry and his girlfriend for that episode get seen by Uncle Leo making out all the way through Schindler's List.

Blue Jam

Good thing there hasn't been a mass murderer called Soda or Seven.

Captain Crunch

Quote from: good times on September 21, 2020, 11:49:26 AMElaine never goes out with any good looking guys (even the so-called pretty boy Tony or whatever his name was isn't really good looking even though it's a plot point)

Elaine's boyfriends are wildly inconsistent, that's what makes it so funny.  There's a nice overview here, personally I'd have put The Wiz in at number 2:

https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/elaine-boyfriends-seinfeld.html

"...he's a gentlemen, he's good looking, he's a good shaver and he hasn't thrown up in eight years so just shut up about him! Shut up!"

Icehaven

Quote from: Blue Jam on November 03, 2020, 01:53:51 PM


Patrick Warburton popped up in the episode of Archer I was watching last night, playing a ruggedly handsome agent who has to rescue Archer and who has all the female agents and Ray swooning over him. I think the character design was at least in part based on the actor:



He's the voice of Joe from Family Guy too and the character looks a bit like him (apart from being in a wheelchair).

Icehaven

Finished my first watch through of it and gone straight back to the beginning, just to check the conversation was the same of course.
Yeah the last episode was bizarre, shame it focussed so much on all the other characters and not the main 4, and there wasn't really any plot, but by getting all the side actors in that's obviously what they'd decided to go with so OK. I've no idea how you'd end a show like that so can't complain that that's what they did, but it could have been better.

Menu

Quote from: gilbertharding on November 03, 2020, 04:06:42 PM
The point of the joke isn't (as far as I know) about the case, as such - it's exactly about the media circus, I assume, specifically the Meryl Streep film.

There's a similar thing where Jerry and his girlfriend for that episode get seen by Uncle Leo making out all the way through Schindler's List.

I have no problem with the Schindler's List one or any other reference. But even at the time I felt the dingo one was just horrifying as a comedic reference. And I get that it was a cultural reference by then(which I find even more shocking) but bloody hell. I'm sure there was a better line they could have gone with. I mean, we're not talking about something from decades ago. The parents would still be alive. Although not the dingo, presumably.

Am I being po-faced? It just makes me wince when I see it.

Menu

Quote from: icehaven on November 06, 2020, 10:41:53 PM
Finished my first watch through of it and gone straight back to the beginning, just to check the conversation was the same of course.
Yeah the last episode was bizarre, shame it focussed so much on all the other characters and not the main 4, and there wasn't really any plot, but by getting all the side actors in that's obviously what they'd decided to go with so OK. I've no idea how you'd end a show like that so can't complain that that's what they did, but it could have been better.

I bet you never watch the last one again. I haven't. What's the point?

The Cloud of Unknowing

They should have said they thought the mugging was him doing a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHixD8MTnc4

Gurke and Hare

The best thing in the finale is the crowd reaction shots in the courtroom.